iv. barack obama

dear mr. president,

a lot of people sure have pinned their hopes on you. are hopes light, like balloons and feathers, so that you might ascend straight up like elijah one day? or are they heavy, becoming burdensome once transferred, like insignificant pebbles which nonetheless sink to the bottom of the ocean floor? are your shoes filling up with salt water, born of so many tears, causing your soles to squeak and your socks to rub blisters into your protruding ankle bones? (for even you have ankle bones, just like the rest of us.) will the oceans ever dry out? will you ever have clean socks again? will those hopes, like so many stones and feathers, yield a giant band-aid on this great nation or only be used to tickle the lucky and forever bruise the downtrodden? are you really ready to learn what hope is? and finally, is there an end to hope, like our oil reserves and bailout fund and number of young who may be sacrificed in the name of selfish, selfish war?

don't let my questions alarm you. i am glad you are willing to take this on. please keep walking, though your soles may squeak, and audaciously confront our tears and oceans of regret and self-indulgent apathy. a few of us are trying to make things better. your election is one of the most significant events in my life, so in that way, hope has already won.

by the way, your kids seem rad, not to mention first lady michelle. would y'all like to come to dinner at my house and meet my cats?

yours truly, a gentle patriot,

ann crews melton

iii. after L

dearest L,

i met a girl at school who reminds me of you. she is also blonde and beautiful in a remarkable way, and she clutches her lighter and cigarettes with shaky hands. she is too kind to tell the awkward ones, her own misfit entourage drawn to her like the pied piper, to let her be. her smile is reluctant and bashful like yours and she flushes quickly when drunk. her clothes are edgy and fashionable, while yours were edgy and fierce, in your miniskirts and boots and metal. refusing to wash became part of your charm. what do we make of the hopes of those days, the imperative to do something contrary to culture? have you stood strong, with your bikes and your rats and your music, or, like me, have you begun to give into the ebb and flow? now my only hope is that this too often cruel world is being kind to you. have you been able to stop smoking? are you doing okay without your pills? "it is not we who are crazy, it is the world," you said, and i love you for that. all the same i swallow my pills every day, because stopping was a sojourn into hell, clinging to pain and mistrusting those i love. how does such a little pill make me able to love and survive?

and so it is, and so it is, and so it always thus shall be?

much love,
A

p.s. i haven't taken out my piercing since we got it done in M---. remember that tattoo artist named shyla who ate her own flesh? she found her religion in needles. i can only hope that we all arrive at such strong faith.

p.p.s. please say hello to the other ocean for me.

ii. memento mori

tonight my apartment reminds me of france. my former life in france was, as one might expect, devastatingly beautiful. the negative allure of the french existed in deep black rivulets that covered my walls, but i found them only fascinating, unaware of their potential entrapment. a large oak tree sturdily approached my windows, through which light would flicker silently. a neighbor told me that the tree was the oldest in town, steadily uprooting our uneven brick courtyard. my ghostly cat lusa and i lived alone together. i believe that we were stunning in our loneliness. i spent the weekends listening to records, staring at the black rivulets growing toward the ceiling, and falling asleep to sometimes troubled dreams.

i often took walks just to look into windows at dusk, fascinated by the white-walled rooms which inevitably glowed yellow in the encroaching dark. there was one apartment a few streets away with a balcony i coveted, covered in distressed brick and ivy and twinkling lights. i was certain no one lived there, and that the light had erased any encroaching blackness that might creep into one's mind. the apartment remained empty for my imagination to explore.

at home i would sit on my own meagre balcony (which faced a wall) and smoke herbal cigarettes, the plumes illuminated by the sun like wisps of spiderweb. i found a love who lived far away, whose ideas captivated, whose bold voice haunted my sometimes troubled dreams. when i saw him in person he evaporated, or i did, after he bought (or stole) me fresh berries. clutching handfuls of his mist i flew home to my white dream cat and white plume smoke to sleep on my beige worn couch, dreaming bold black dreams.

i. nkeng

My sophomore year of college, my intended roommate did not return to school, so I was paired with an international student. Nkeng was from Cameroon, in her third year as a pre-med, and had not seen her family since she began school in the States. We maintained a congenial but restrained acquaintanceship; I had my friends, and while I was intrigued by her difference (and silently congratulated myself on the diversity of my dorm-room environment), I did not exert the effort to truly befriend her. Besides, I reasoned, it’s better not to become too close to your roommate—then you end up spending too much time together and inevitably fighting or harboring resentment.

When we did hang out, we laughed a lot, and I can easily recall the perfectly round moon of her face breaking into a smile. One time I assisted her while she put in hair extensions, a laborious process that took all afternoon in front of the television. Other times, though, I found the constant laugh track of American sitcoms grating. She constantly crunched on chips that stained her long, brown fingers. When I returned from a trip, I found one of my dresses stretched out. She eventually made some friends in the science building; nevertheless, I could not completely ignore how lonely her life must have been.

Years later I ran into Nkeng in the middle of Harvard Square, weaving among pedestrians near the newsstand. We saw one another at the same time and paused for a bewildered embrace. She was studying chemistry and still had not returned home to visit her family. I was working in town after meandering across the country, settling here to be with friends. We exchanged phone numbers and said our goodbyes, but did not call one another. I suspected we would have nothing to talk about.